The art is replete with educational teaching devices of various levels of complexity. Probably the most widely used computer-based teaching device is the personal computer. Thousands of hours of courseware are available for use on such computers, and they find wide application in colleges, high schools and grade schools. Nevertheless, such systems suffer from a number of shortcomings. First, they are expensive, each generally costing on the order of a thousand dollars or more. Second, and probably more important, when they are used for remedial teaching purposes, the students find them difficult to use and intimidating (e.g. they require the reading of text from a display and the entry of inputs through a letter/number oriented keyboard). The requirement to make abstract translations between desired selections and the key or button strokes required for input to make those selections, is a significant obstacle to the unsophisticated user. These factors, cost and difficulty of use, inhibit the use of such systems for remedial applications and for the learning impaired. Certain companies have attempted to overcome these drawbacks by the introduction of toy-like products which perform a limited teaching function. For instance, the Texas Instruments "Speak and Spell" (a Trademark of Texas Instruments) and other similar products are such toys but have limited application to adult remedial education due to a lack of flexibility of lesson structure, the user's inability to modify the internal pedagogical program, limited display capability and, most important, a reliance on an alpha-numeric keyboard or button set for input. At the other extreme are full function, general purpose computers along with various displays and data input and storage devices (e.g. video discs) which are expensive.
Others have suggested for both training and game applications, the use of a television receiver in combination with a simplified input device. In U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,728,480 and Reissue 32,305, R. H. Baer shows the connection of the control unit to a television receiver with the control unit including means for the manipulation and control of video signals to be displayed on the receiver's screen. Individual control units are provided for the game participants. In certain configurations, a commercial television station broadcasts encoded question and answer data which is decoded and displayed on the receiver screen and the user responds thereto via the control unit.
A similar system is found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,569,026 and 4,333,152 which both describe an interactive system wherein a user interacts with a video display through the manipulation of a hand held control unit. Other, more complex, teaching systems are also well known in the art and employ a large central computer for control of relatively nonintelligent terminals. One such system is PLATO (a Trademark of the Control Data Corporation) wherein hundreds, if not thousands, of remotely located terminals provide pedagogical software to remotely located users.
All of the above systems suffer from one or more of the following shortcomings: too expensive; intimidating and/or impractical for unsophisticated users; lack of flexibility in providing appropriate pedagogical software to the user; and/or significant training is required before a user is able to interact with the system.
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to provide low cost, computer-based teaching apparatus which is particularly adapted to remedial applications.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a low cost computer based teaching apparatus which is not intimidating to the unskilled user and avoids the use of a keyboard input.
Another object of the invention is to provide a user friendly interactive teaching apparatus which relates the results of a teaching exercise both visually and audibly.